Talk about innovation … how about charging your cellphone with hamster power? It seems a 16-year-old Englishman did a science project that achieved just that. Peter Ash hooked up his hamster's exercise wheel to a phone charger to get 30 minutes of talk time for every two minutes that Elvis, his hamster, works out on the wheel. Unfortunately for Peter, his project only got him a C, which didn't seem to be much help since he got a D in the course. What's the moral of the story? Don't spend so much time getting your hamster to charge your cellphone when you could always just plug into an outlet. Apparently the time you have to commit to the Hamster Power revolutino affects your grades. Read more from the Ananova article.

USER COMMENTS 14 comment(s)

Teacher was jealous!!!(8:52am EST Tue Aug 30 2005)Not inovative thinking, but good implimentation. A 16-year-old could come up with the idea, no too amazing, but a 16-year-old doing the job, THAT'S Amazing. Not that this is a new way to get energy, but at 16 all i wanted was sex, not a recharged cell phone. Don't worry I did use a hamster or it's wheel to solve my needs, could have made some good science projects though. - by No Pets, Just Porn!!

i wonder…(9:32am EST Tue Aug 30 2005)did he play the hamsterdance while the little mammal worked?

da da dee da dee da do do… - by JunkTheMagicDragon

Wrong class(10:33am EST Tue Aug 30 2005)He got a C because the class was English Literature.

(Anyone know what the class really was?) - by Hah

…(10:37am EST Tue Aug 30 2005)I'm sure his only getting a C had nothing to do with his idea. More likely his writeup or presentation was lacking. His D in science certainly shows he had more problems in the course than the project, so whatever his problem it carried over to his project earning him a lower grade. Someone else could have taken this same idea and gotten an A. A really lazy person could likewise get a lower grade with this idea. - by QM

…(10:48am EST Tue Aug 30 2005)I remember my younger sister used to own a hamster. A stinky horrid rotten thing it was. It used to have a hamster wheel that used to creak no matter how well oiled it was, and it used to wait until I was going to bed before using it. It's good to see that such a horrid little thing now has a purpose.

You could create a perpetual motion machine with it by using the energy generated by the wheel to zap the hamster to make it run faster.

No hamsters were harmed in the ramblings of this deranged and perhaps drunk tramp. - by A Goddamned Tramp

..(11:23am EST Tue Aug 30 2005)hahaha, it was the English class

not innovative? it allows you to save some cents at month

Even better, if the system can be attached to a walking excercise machine , you can make excercise and save energy, energy to be used somewhere on the house :D - by Yuri HA from México

um(11:52am EST Tue Aug 30 2005)what moron has a hamster at 16? - by Grow up

24 hours fitness(3:29pm EST Tue Aug 30 2005)now theres enough fat people there to power a city. Imagine that, fat people releasing all thier fat that they've taken from society for their laziness giving it back.

- by really fat bastard

Useless(8:11pm EST Tue Aug 30 2005)

You have to feed the hamster, clean its cage, etc. NO money is actually saved. - by DragonHat

Useless(8:15pm EST Tue Aug 30 2005)

The downside is that you have feed your hamster, clean its cage, etc. Too much work involved in getting the sucker onto the wheel, etc. Much easier to just connect it to the wall. - by DragonHat

…(3:25am EST Wed Aug 31 2005)I like really fat bastard's idea.

Or an even better one whereby we simply rig all the criminals and the like to a huge generator and make them generate power for our cities. There's enough of them, and at least that way they earn the tax money we're paying to feed and house them. - by A Goddamned Tramp

So if a powerful human could generate 1/4 of a horse power, that's maybe 150 watts at a generator (generators are not 100% efficient). So that's about one cent worth of my electricity per hour of peddling.

So a human peddling or running 8 hours/days would produce less than a dime/day of electricity. A dime/day wouldn't even pay for the generator device. You'd loose the taxpayer money turning these guys into generators, not save them any.

A better solution would be to either shoot them or turn them loose (i.e. no prisons). It cost upwards of $30,000/yr to house a minimum security prisoner, about $100/day. What kind of job can we give these low lives that makes $100/day. Financially speaking they can never really “pay off their debt to society”. - by EE

Personally, it'd be a lot cheaper for us to simply cut of the hands of theives, ramove the genitals of rapists, and simply kill the murderers out there – and it'd probably be a hell of a lot better deterrent too, but it'll never be thanks to 'criminal rights'.

As far as I'm concerned, a person loses his or her rights as soon as they abuse them and break the law.

Society works hard to support itself, so why should it pay for the existence of those that would be the enemies of it? It's bad enough that we'd have to pay for the bullets to shoot them with…

It seems logical to build some kind of device that would use the scum of the earth for something useful. The prisons offer them jobs that pay a couple of cents a day, but why should we pay them that when we're paying for their existence?

Perhaps a single person working on a treadmill may not create enough power, but imagine if hundreds of them were – all at once. There'd be a reasonable amount of power there I'd imagine.

Turn them into slave labour. They lost their rights when they turned on the society that gave them. - by A Goddamned Tramp

Reader Comments

Dan

Here’s the deal, if you already have a hampster b/c your daughter came home one day w/ tears in her eyes, or your mom who works at a school calles you saying a teacher is trying to get rid of a hampster, you MAY AS WELL put the Godd#mn thing to work. Those things are little machines, 11:15 EVERY NIGHT, that thing is on it’s wheel until about 3am. I wish I could heat my house w/ it. An AWESOME idea!!